#there's some wars in fallout tactics

[artbyblastweave]

What part of the Fallout setting and themes would you want to focus on if you got to decide on the direction of a new game?

Observation that's been boiling in the back of my head since forever is that out of all the games in a series where the tagline is that War Never Changes, New Vegas is about war to an extent that the other games never really approach. Really the only example of a traditional ground war between peer states or something akin, with articulated battle lines, points of contention, supply chain issues and the like. Fallouts 1 and 2 get at least a partial pass because they're set before humanity's redeveloped the capacity for state on state violence; 3 and 4 are trying to be about Wars but kind of flail their arms on that front, 4 in particular. Regardless I want more of New Vegas's energy on this front.

[callofdudes]

141 + Alex + Farah + könig and three favourite video games headcanons ??

Ghost:

The duality of playing both Dead Space and Animal Crossing.

Anything horror, a good shooter from time to time but he's realistically more about getting his blood going through tension, dark corridors, and good scares.

But will also make Animal Crossing characters of him and you so you can have a little house.

Gaz:

The embodiment of shooters, or story incorporated games like Destiny 2 and Halo.

Loves immersive large worlds that are tailored to his DnD heart. Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate are ones dear to his heart Also loves the online features.

Will play Mario Kart against Soap for hours.

Soap:

Similar to Gaz, he enjoys a blend of shooters and fantasy incorporated stories. Although Elden Ring frustrated him more than anything.

God of War Ragnarok, Diablo IV and the likes. Plays his fair share of Grand Theft Auto. Burnout Revenge and other driving games.

Plays hardcore shooters and Fortnite with his sisters back home.

Price:

Tetris. No, not because I think this 37 year old is extremely old, but because Price understands that Tetris was and still is the foundation of everything good videogames are.

Also of the opinion that he played 2007s BioShock, Diablo II, and Wii sports. Oh, also Red Dead Redemption.

Alex:

Right off the bat, he was a Mario Kart kid, was raised on the LoZ (Legend of Zelda) games, and they all hold places in his heart. Also had a Wii and early version Xbox. Played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

Indulged in Grand Theft Auto at one time but never stole anything. He just slapped people and drove cars at ridiculous speeds for hours. Which leads me to my next point, racing games. TDU2 is one near and dear to his heart.

Farah:

If Farah were to play any game I think she'd enjoy a combination of puzzle games and action. She's as much a fan of online chess as she is of Skyrim.

Since getting into Skyrim she has tried other games like Fallout, but some of the themes have made her less open to playing.

Plays the HTTYD 2 game from 2010 and she enjoys it. She likes flying around and exploring, it's calming.

She joins Animal Crossing and Ghost makes a new island so they can cause absolute chaos together, and they both love it and bond over it.

König:

I'm so serious when I say this. Angry Birds Epic. Also played Far Cry when it came out. A lot of the games he played came from Germany based companies. (I know he doesn't live in Germany before y'all bite me)

He also played Battle Isle 2200 and Panzer General from 1994. Lots of older tactics games like that.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

So I think part of the reason--aside from the usual hatred of the Jewish people--that leftists in particular absolutely lose their minds over Israel is because Israel is a real world example that utterly destroys their worldview that the stronger party in a conflict is always the oppressor, and the weaker is always oppressed.

Israel is one of, if not the, strongest nations in the middle east. They have a stable government, a strong military, modern technology, and they even have nukes. They once fought off the combined forces of three different Arab countries. Their military is so good that they're cleaning house in Gaza right now while most of their army is on the border with Lebanon just in case they decide to try and invade. By almost every measurable metric, Israel is an absolute beast.

And yet they're not the ones oppressing their neighboring countries.

They're almost completely surrounded by countries who have either publicly stated that they want to wipe Israel off the map, or they house and fund terrorist groups who do. Hamas constantly fires rockets, unprovoked, at Israeli civilian centers and buildings from Gaza--a "nation" that only exists because Israel freed it, evacuated all the Jews, and allowed it to govern itself, mind. Iran is in the process of acquiring its own nuclear weapons and when that happens you better believe they're all going to be aimed directly at Israel. On the world stage, oppressive, genocidal kings and dictators are patted on the back and welcomed as friends while Israel is constantly sanctioned and demeaned and told not to defend itself.

And then you have October 7th.

Hundreds of "oppressed" terrorists struck back at their "oppressors" by launching a surprise raid where they murdered, raped, and kidnapped Jewish civilians, some of them children, then scurried back across the border because they knew they could never fight the IDF head on. More than just being evil, these were the tactics of cowards who know they can't stand against their stronger enemy. And what was Israel's response?

They declared war, then waged that war by sending their own citizens into danger instead of carpet bombing Gaza into slag. Which they could have done. They had a ready excuse, if they wanted it. Even without using nukes, which would have been bad for them too with the fallout so close, they could have utterly wiped Gaza off the face of the Earth. If they were oppressors, if they were the genocidal monsters the Mohammadans and their enablers in the west claim they are, they most likely would have done exactly that, hostages or no.

The fact that they didn't, that the truly oppressive actions are coming from the "weaker" party, exposes the leftist lie on power dynamics. Strength doesn't automatically mean oppression. Weakness doesn't automatically assign virtue. Instead, it's actions that determine morality.

And the left can't stand that. Because it means all the vile shit they do in the name of fighting "oppression" is no longer justified.

And that's not at all a conversation they're ready, or able, to have.

[rickrossome]

So the new Fallout show has a map of all the vaults, and I noticed that one of the vaults seems to be right where the IRL Cheyenne Mountain Complex is

It just so happens that in Fallout Tactics shows us what vault is where the Cheyenne Mountain Complex once was

Vault 0

Vault 0 was created to be the nucleus of the Vault experiment. It was built by expanding and reinforcing the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. The inhabitants included several “pre-war geniuses” who had their brains removed and connected to a supercomputer called “The Calculator”. However, due to budget cuts by the US Department Of Defence, some important systems failed which caused The Calculator to become… a bit wacky, which leads to the events of Fallout Tactics, which ends with the Midwestern BOS taking it over and making it their new base of operations

Now Fallout Tactics was of debatable canonicity. You had some people saying it wasn’t canon, some saying it was, some saying that parts of it were canon, all that jazz. But a few days before the replesse of the TV show, the studio design director of Bethesda posted this

Tactics is canon

Vault 0 is canon

Combined with what we know of Vault-Tec’s plan in the show, I think we might be seeing Vault 0 again sometime soon.

[w98pops]

my not so new fallout ocs!!! yuppieee

the girl's name is june, she's a radio operator and sort of an apprentice to ronald curtis. she's very cheerful and kind, but does her job very well. june never actually been to an actual active warzone, she joined maccaran just a year before the second battle for hoover dam and in this short time made a name for herself as an excellent technicial and an amazing person who can always raise the spirits of men, even in the darkest of times :)

thomas, on the other hand, is a wreck. he joined the ncr at the age of 17 and been tirelessly serving the cause ever since. he's an amazing commander, great soldier and a wonderful father. all in all, after openly criticising general lee's war tactics, the bitter springs and the boulder city bombing (where he lost his daughter) major williams was gently displaced, honorably discharged and put in a "military advisor" position with the worst wage possible. it didn't help the fact that rumors starting to spead about thomas' little brother being a high rank legionary so yeah! also no healthcare, the prosthetics were made by his sister, a follower of the apocalypse. he resides in maccaran as of now, with no money to afford himself living quarters, being the black sheep and burden to most people in camp. except his old friend james hsu and an impressionable young woman june slivovitz.

tune in for some wacky new vegas adventures with a traumatised old guy and a silly hyperactive girl. im here all week

[mllemaenad]

Do you have any takes on the NCR? I'm relatively new to Fallout, but most of what I know about it is either from the tv show or from your Fallout 4 posting from a few years back, neither of which gives me much of a look at what the NCR was like when it was still around and not blown up. And you generally have good takes on video game factions.

Oh – thank you! I don't know if I'll be able to maintain that reputation, but we'll see. :)

I also don't know what you've started playing or intend to play, so I'll try to keep my spoilers at least a little vague so I don't spoil anything particularly cool for you.

My feelings about the NCR are complicated. You see, they look a lot like us. To be more specific, they look a lot like 20th century Americans. I'm not American and the 20th century was a while ago now – but there's still a lot that's familiar and comfortable. Like watching an older film: some of the slang is a bit weird, and the phones are wrong, but you could have a sensible conversation with these people, you know?

Because of the whole "alternate history" thing, the pre-war world can feel a bit distant. I think the TV series contains the longest stint we've ever had there, although I guess that depends a bit on how long a person takes to slog through Operation Anchorage. You mostly pick up bits of history from old holotapes and terminals. The stories are interesting: sometimes funny and sometimes tragic. But they are very much from another world. A world with a much stronger commitment to poodle skirts and Bing Crosby than we have.

But the NCR? If you play all the games, you live through their rise and fall. I have walked my clueless Vault Dweller into the tiny village of Shady Sands, and been very pleased to find some people who don't want to kill me. I've played the tourist in Fallout 2, walking through the actual modern capital city of the New California Republic – a standout area in a game largely full of shanty towns (there's Vault City but ... Vault City is not a fun place).

And there's genuinely a lot here to celebrate. They are the survivors of a Vault-Tec experiment specifically designed to test how a lot of diverse and contentious groups could live together. I'm not saying there's no bigotry in the NCR, because there is, but it's not built into their ideology the way it is in some other factions. There's a Super Mutant serving among the NCR Rangers in Fallout 2, and a ghoul town was among the republic's founding members. They explicitly state that they welcome mutant immigrants.

They're coaxing agriculture back into the wasteland even in the original Fallout, and they later expand into industry. They've got trade and education (there's apparently a university in the LA Boneyard, a thing I am sad that we never got to see), and they've outlawed slavery. In a lot of ways the rise of the NCR is a testament to human resilience in the face of incredible adversity.

But. Of course there's a but.

They are trying to rebuild on old world principles. There is a reason they look a lot like 20th century Americans. And they have not solved old world problems. As early as Fallout 2 there's evidence of the use of really dodgy expansionist tactics, and by New Vegas you're holding your breath as you watch them. Their army is simultaneously uncomfortably large and stretched too thin. Their economy is in trouble, and too much wealth is concentrating in too few hands. And they're pushy in a way you'd really prefer a democracy not to be. They have innocent blood on their hands.

They remain the good karma choice compared to Caesar's Legion, sure, but "crucifixion, rampant misogyny and mass slavery" are really low hurdles to get over. Their choices are ... troubling.

So there's a lot to critique, too, but in a way that mostly makes me sad. It makes you ask – is this inevitable? Is every society destined to deteriorate like this? Fallout's core thesis is "war never changes", so I think to some extent the answer is yes. At least – there's no perfect system or hopeful beginning that guarantees things won't go wrong. You have to watch all the time, or you end up back at the mushroom cloud.

If I have a critique of the TV series as it stands, it's that the destruction of the NCR by Vault-Tec in a fit of pique is an excellent way to mourn the good in the NCR (the sight of a hole where Shady Sands used to be hurts, just as worrying about the fate of characters I loved who lived in NCR territory hurts), but it does little to explore the problems of a democracy setting itself up as a newborn empire.

With that said, I expect that criticism is unfair as the series had a lot of legwork to do, explaining the world to any newcomers and ... I mean, there's a time and a place for delving into 23rd century politics and that probably isn't it.

I expect that they'll deal with this more in later seasons, particularly as we are headed toward New Vegas, heart of the "guys, are we sure this is a good idea?" NCR question.

[callmearcturus]

okay so PC Gamer just scattered a bunch of catnip for me with an article about What If Each Fallout Game Were A Movie, Who Would Direct It and I am going to read this live and judge it

because I'm having a relapse, we all understand this

A focused, mature, pressure cooker of a movie that is short and stylishly violent? Better call the director of John Wick to take the directorial reigns. Personally, I find Leitch's movies tend to have rather underwhelming final acts, too, and also have a penchant for ending abruptly when you feel more could have followed, so he's the perfect fit for a game that's incredible until it very quickly ends without much fanfare. John Wick movies don't tend to be very wacky either, often depicting the hero's world as very serious (despite the ludicrous premise of the fiction), so again this feels a strong and apt choice for the OG Fallout. A Friday night action movie.

HMMMMMM. I feel like I disagree on the mode I would want FO1 to be in. Like, yes, you can play it that way, but FO1 is famously one of the first games to make Speech arguably the most important skill to have in a video game, so I dunno. I love Leitch and feel like while his sense of realistic-yet-stunning action is a trademark, I think the use of locations is even more of his thing, and when I think about memorable locations, I think more of FO2 than FO1.

I feel like I would give FO1 to some hyper-realistic scumbag who is more obsessed with Process than Enterta-- oh. Nolan. gdi I'd give FO1 to Chris fucking Nolan, him whomst I loathe.

Who better to direct this expansive and often wacky depiction of the Fallout universe than the director responsible for epics such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote? Gilliam loves a good road trip in his work, too, which fits with Fallout 2's Highwayman-based exploration, and his penchant for vast vistas with wacky and absurd details feels perfect. The combat scenes wouldn't be as slick as Leitch's Fallout movie, but characterisation and a more rambling, philosophical, off-beat narrative would deliver. Plus, Fallout 2 even has a Bridge Keeper encounter that directly references Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which Gilliam starred. Watch on a Saturday night for a bit of everything.

......... I straight up cannot argue with that. No notes.

For a movie based on a game that is focussed almost entirely on squad-based combat in urban environments, combat where soldiers die in terrible ways and the horrors of war are all too apparent, I feel the director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow is perfect for this. Fallout: Tactics would be a war movie with a very tight focus and strong characterisation for just a handul of lead characters. Tense and at times adrenaline-inducing due to the flashes of extreme violence, but interspersed with soul-searching dialogue from its grizzled, war-scarred leads, this would be an erudite and focused Fallout war movie. Watch on a Monday or Tuesday night.

Looking at Bigelow's list of works is how I just now learned she also did Strange Days, so I think it's fair to say that this is giving her way too small of a pick. Give her FO1 and give Leitch FOT.

It would be so bad. Forget about A-bombs, everyone in the movie would drop an F-bomb every other line. Don't watch on any night.

Fucking weak-ass pick. Think about the history of how FO:BoS happened, i.e. they were trying to slap the Fallout license onto a completely different style of game without any respect for the source material. They swapped out Nuka Cola for Bawls product placement.

Give it to Zack Synder.

As the game that properly introduced V.A.T.S. system slow-mo to the Fallout universe, with kill shots shown off in glorious bullet time, there can be only one director for a film version of Fallout 3: the master himself, John Woo. Woo's stellar action movie work in titles such as Hard Boiled, Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2, among others, means the action in this game is off the charts. Slow-mo radiated doves and all! Woo handles the post-apocalypse war vibes well, too, thanks to his work on Windtalkers, while he communicates the hero's awakening into the future thanks to previous on Paycheck. A good fit for Friday night, thanks to the action, or midday during the weekend due to a longish, war movie-style runtime.

.....................

holy shit i cannot argue with that, that's genius. absolutely fucking yes. i think that's a perfect fit.

also, like, FO3 and Woo have the same "problem" for me, in that they know exactly what they are doing, it's just not my cup of tea, but there is a solid identity there.

yeah, fucking do it, give FO3 to John Woo.

SHUT THE FUCK UP

WHO WROTE THIS ARTICLE, AND DID THEY WRITE IT FROM MY FUCKING ATTIC?!

Casinos, gritty environments, extreme violence and heist movie vibes mean I think of Guy Ritchie for this film adaptation. Ritchie's also a fan of slow-mo combat shots, too, so we've got the game's V.A.T.S. system represented well, too, while the game's macho factional warfare as undertaken by factions like Caesar's Legion and the NCR, is right in keeping with Ritchie's love of gang-based conflict. There's not much romance in New Vegas, either, which is a weak spot for Ritchie, but as shown in movies like Sherlock Holmes, Snatch, The Gentleman, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he's good at holding together movies with various interconnecting narratives. His work on Aladdin also shows he can handle the comedic and wacky aspects of New Vegas, too. A mid-week action-comedy treat.

/rubs face

I am unfortunately a massive fucking fan of Ritchie movies. this is so powerful.

i think........... Ritchie is so thoroughly uninterested in saying anything philosophically profound, you cannot give him The Most Profound Fallout Game. like, I want to love this idea, I really do, but no.

....................... You need someone with snappy dialogue that actually means something, who is willing to veer into borderline magical realism, who loves an overdressed set, and who can manage a lot of different characters with well-reasoned motivations.

I think you need Rian Johnson.

OR DO I JUST WANT RIAN JOHNSON TO MAKE A VERSION OF "DEAD MONEY" THAT DOESN'T SUCK? WHO COULD SAY.

I feel Ang Lee is a good choice for a Fallout 4 movie adaptation, having good form in handling large and sprawling fictions with plenty of characters and side-stories. Just look at films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi as an example of this. He's got some form with action, too, thanks to his work on Hulk. There's probably more romance/relationship offering in Fallout 4 than in any other Fallout, and Ang Lee has form here too. The result, though, is a movie that ends up being a bit flabby and unfocussed at times, despite technically bringing more to the table than Fallout 3, and being funnier and lighter overall. Watch on a day off due to a chonky runtime.

what are you fucking talking about, Ang Lee's best movies are Brokeback and Sense & Sensibility, and his worst are probably Hulk and Gemini Man. Fallout 4 is the one where Bethesda just stopped pretending to give a shit about story and roleplaying, instead pivoting the game into a skinner box of tightly-honed but ultimately soulless mechanics.

I'm not even trying to mock Marvel, but I feel like the MCU's Design-By-Producer-And-Executive-Oversight is actually the answer here. It doesn't matter who directs it because the main voice will be a board room.

oh shut upppppp

Fallout Shelter would in some ways be the most obvious setup for a movie: the self-contained story of a vault-dwelling society, interspersed with the surface adventures of random dwellers. Sounds a bit like the TV show when you put it like that, which is why there's only one Nolan for the job: Christopher! Yes, fresh off Oppenheimer it is time for Oppenheimer 2, focusing on the aftermath of all-out nuclear war (hell, Cillian Murphy can even have a cameo as a brain in a jar, I'm that generous). Moody, intense, riven with twists you didn't see coming, and with all special effects done for realsies, this movie could only ever be rad. The only downside is that, like the TV show Silo, you'd spend an awful lot of time indoors.

absolutely fucking not. the thing about Nolan is that his shit is so meticulous, it like.... pitches past hyper-realism and lands in this weird uncanny valley of "he wouldn't fucking say that" but it's for a character you've only known for ten minutes.

FO: Shelter is about emergent storytelling that feels almost accidental rather than arranged or scripted. you need someone who is hands-off the script but can capture a.... good moment..............

oh god, it's JJ Abrams, isn't it? god dammit. or, frankly? Spielberg. so I'm saying no to the director i hate and offering instead two other directors i dislike, but for different reasons.

yeah. yep. that's what i'm doing.

SPITTAKE

As an MMO that takes many aspects of the Fallout universe to the extreme, it feels a movie version of Fallout 76 would be akin to a huge-budget, climatic MCU movie where it really helps if you've had previous with the series to get most enjoyment. As such, I feel the Russo brothers would take the reigns for Fallout 76. The result would be a jack-of-all-trades action-adventure that borrows bits of every previous Fallout to make something that appeals to a lot of people but, after watching, doesn't go down as something you'd rewatch for most all of them. Big, bright, wacky and action-filled, there's no doubting though that you get a spectacle and fun, though. Watch in two sittings over two nights (as the movie's runtime is 3 hours 47 minutes).

no. fuck you. i reject your premise. the Fallout game that shipped with no NPCs and expected the story to be entirely conveyed by set-pieces, environmental design, and audiologs?

resurrect Tarkovsky and give us FO76, desolate and beautiful with environmental shots that last seven minutes without a cut. because the only good thing about FO76 is the setting, the amount of effort put into building the actual space, so I want 90 minutes of film and seven pages of script.

Russo Brothers, get tf out of here

[wifflum]

Video games that suck and why they suck

Dark Souls spawned a wonderful genre with an excellent, new (besides Demon's Souls), combat system that has been improved to have everything you could think of asking for, by games like Stellar Blade. Dark Souls, even though it was first, however, sucks. Here's why it sucks.

Dark Souls was made by a self-proclaimed masochist who said, about the game, "these are ways I would like to die," and then set the entire game design team to the objective of killing the player at every opportunity. It's like hostile architecture as a video game. The game is trying to kill you at almost every step, but it had this amazing new combat system, so that was tolerated. Now the blind sheep that are the masses worship it.

Elden Ring and Sekiro, on the other hand, did not have this incredibly sadistic touch to them, and are far more fun to actually play. And these trainwrecks who love Dark Souls would say it's a skill issue, to not enjoy crawling your way to the next death spot like it's progression in Final Fantasy XIV raids only through a fu**ing level, let alone the boss fights, and would blame the victim of literal and admitted game design sadism.

Red Dead Redemption, Spiderman, God of War, and also Grand Theft Auto (at least the campaign) and Uncharted-- all of these games also suck. This is because they are not made with gameplay in mind, because the target audience hardly gives a sh** about gameplay and just wants an interactive movie. They are, as a popular and often contrarian video game critic put it, "ghost train rides". They are theme park attractions that are purely there to entertain from a distance, and not really to be interacted with like you would expect from a video game. Gameplay is secondary, and it's often almost tertiary it's so far from being considered important. That is why these games suck.

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Another somewhat extensive area for video games to suck in, is the Fallout and Elder Scrolls type of games. These games, instead of making story so fu**ing primary that gameplay, the whole point of video games existing at all, is ignored, do the exact same thing with their open-worlds and RPG mechanics. Just imagine a turn-based game like Final Fantasy 7, only the gameplay that can actually kind of stand on its own is actually gameplay that sucks co** and could never stand on its own.

----------------------------

I play video games for combat. To have fun and display skill. Everything else is set dressing for that one primary thing, and games that suck either intentionally obstruct fun combat, like Dark Souls does, or might as well not even include it it's so bad.

-----------------------------

Some other games that suck are fighting games, because in order to get your ration of 3 seconds of neutral game per match, which might be pretty good but in my experience isn't anything to write to my girlfriend in jail about, you have to spend 8 million hours mastering filler moves that waste both players time and just drop the health bars to what they might as well be at the start, which is 3 hits until death.

Tactical RPGs are not that bad, I don't think, but dear God are they stressful sometimes. It's also slow and can get tiresome unless you personally are slow and tired and prefer that pace over action games.

First Person Shooters need defense options other than fu**ing sprint or better offense (throwing a flashbang is an offense action, as is laying a mine) for every situation, which Remnant: From the Ashes really put in sharp relief.

MOBAs, like League of Legends, need to be done differently rather than copying a game that had a barely passing grade on its combat system (DOTA 1 on Warcraft 3) because it took it from an strategy game where you're supposed to be spending 3/4 of your time managing your base and resources and only fighting a small portion of the time. Battleborn actually showed what MOBAs are capable of to some degree, although it didn't have dodges or anything, but got overshadowed by Overwatch which everyone either immediately regretted or regrets now since Overwatch is agony to play.

One game that largely sucked but did not entirely suck, contrary to what everyone and their goldfish will tell you, was Anthem. At one point it had a triple jump, triple dodge, comboing melee character that could frontflip into sniping something in the head or spraying it with submachine gun fire. Yes, that was motherfu**ing Anthem that had that, in the Interceptor Javelin, though the people in the other Javelins did not look to be having much fun.

The last games that suck, which I think everyone largely knows they suck, are Ubisoft games. Now Far Cry isn't that bad, because it still has a reasonable focus on gameplay, but Assassin's Creed games have combat that is almost as ass as Rockstar games' gameplay.

Just, all you have to do, lol, is take some reasonable approximation of soulslike combat, with an actual functional deflect if you include one, unlike Rise of the Ronin, and do whatever your little gimmick is on top of that. People will fall over themselves saying how amazing it is. Just make ACCEPTABLE gameplay with whatever your horsesh** is that your audience of nitwits loves, and it will be something as if from an advanced society in the future.

Although, I personally think the window for that is closing and it wouldn't be jaw-dropping anymore, with soulslikes branching out so much. All we really need now is a soulslike MMO and that'll be the kitchen sink, and I think it's rapidly approaching. All I would ask of someone doing that is that you model the PvP after Guild Wars 1 Random Arenas, and you'd have to study that pretty extensively because there's a lot of nuance that made it so good, but it was namely an extreme difficulty to combat, like you'd get from a PvE game set to Insanity difficulty, somehow enveloping the PvP experience.

----------------------

Anyway, that's how video games of today almost all suck. And it's because they're not really video games; they're either like a simulation of something, traveling or getting stronger, or just straight-up a movie, with video gameyness slapped onto the side like a sticker, with about as much effort put into the application. The games that are good, as video games and not interactive media, which is what a lot of these things should be distinguished as, ask the user to display skill and they make that display enjoyable and varied. There's a million ways to screw up the execution of that design or to excel at it, but only a few games even set that objective of good combat as an actual goal.

But, if it makes makes money it's fine how it is, fu** foresight and artistic integrity, and we must all keep churning out pig slop to the pigs.

[catgirlforeskin]

Anyone got recommendations for co-op/solo wargames? Got Battlespace Deluxe recently and enjoy it, but it’s mostly for individual skirmishes, there’s no metaprogression or mechanics for narrative between battles. Currently I’m using halo mega construx terrain and figures which are in 1/36 scale, a bit bigger than the recommended 28mm which about 1/58 scale but what are you gonna do. I’m interested in other modern or scifi mini-agnostic games but also kindaaaa wanna make bad financial decisions. The wife wants to get into mini painting and would prefer we play something co-op over versus each other

So far what’s caught my eye is:

-Five Parsecs From Home: very campaign focused, minis agnostic, im not super into the default Firefly style campaign but the Bug Hunt military campaign structure is more interesting to me, and it has a Tactics expansion dropping soon for platoon scale play, which I’m interested in, as Battlespace is at most 4-8 troops

-Chain of Command: really cool looking more simulationist about managing a platoon that tries to capture morale, more realistic coordination, and the reality of command vs mind controlling all units. Biggest flaw is it’s ww2 and I’m not at all interested (though it has some fan reskins to other settings like Star Wars) and I don’t think it’s meant for co-op, which is what I wanted

-Horizon Wars: I know basically nothing about it outside of that it has three different scales of play that can intersect and that’s neat

-Fallout: Wasteland Warfare: haven’t heard anything too thrilling about the co-op play but I like NCR troops lol

-Star Wars: Legions: same as above but replace NCR with Rebel Alliance, but solo is even less supported

If any of y’all know anything about em or other games I haven’t listed, comment below, I generally trust tumblrinas over Redditors I’ve previously been getting this info from

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

The reason I typically dont concern myself with lore issues and retcons in the Fallout series(Although Fallout 76 is testing my limits on that), is that well...the series has always had that problem from the very beginning.

Take for example how Vault-Tec has become more cartoonishly evil as the series has progressed. In the original Fallout(ignoring everything to come after), its pretty clear the problems with the Vaults are the result of short-sightness and greed, Vault-Tec cut corners and didnt really think about how people would actually have to live in the vaults(possibly because they didnt really think nuclear war would happen, and were just raking in money). Theres no indication that there were experiments or that there was anything more nefarious than corporate greed.

Fallout 2 hints that there was some wider agenda, but doesnt indicate much more. Apparently the original idea was that the vaults were experiments on building a spaceship to escape earth And interplay's Fallout 3 would have revealed this. But it got canceled.

Fallout Tactics revealed that government leaders and top scientists had had their brains placed in vats networked to a supercomputer. And were supposed to use the data from the vaults to assist in rebuilding civilization, but flaws in the machinery drove them insane and caused to try to kill everything instead. (Its also questionable if FoT is canon, but I like to accept it as such)

Once Bethesda got ahold of the franchise Vault-Tec is like 'We're gonna pump drugs through the ventilation system' and other such mad-scientist nonsense.

Then the Fallout tv series reveals that Vault-tec actually orchestrated the war so they could rule the world afterwords.

[toothpulpart]

This is a wip for now, but I’m pretty happy about what I have produced in the time I did. The quality of my pictures are kinda garbage but I can’t figure out why. I have been on a fallout kick recently and wanted to draw Nick Valentine, one of my favorites and someone who despite his brain coming from a cop has a decent character build. Which obviously all cops are bastards, even the original Nick Valentine. They uphold the interests of the capital owners with violence against the workers and lower class. And we are starting to see the late stages of it already with cop cities being built so they can better use war tactics on citizens. This is what late stage capitalism has wet dreams about. I don’t know what options we have left some days and the further things progress the more worried I get.

[precious-little-scoundrel]

Grim Reader here ☠️ I have a thought on Smith that I’d love to chat about. I think where she had a rudimentary and simple bare minimum understanding of sex, it would be interesting to see more of a sexual fallout and trauma appear later on in her life. At a point where she understands sex more and has enjoyed it, it’s at that point where she’s able to recognize the horror that she went through for what it fully is. Maybe this is several years after the war ends and she’s been married for a while. But I think it’s one thing to go through trauma and not really understand it. It’s quite another to go through trauma and have enough time and distance to look back and see it fully for what it was and realize just what she’d actually been through. Your thoughts?

Umm hello, hello, I’ve missed you and this is so utterly pertinent to an older ask I answered last night that I must skip the line and dabble here. Becasue I literally kept rolling over in my sleep and thinking of Benny and Lu. And im convinced they’re mainly ok, most of the time, for much of their intimate lives.

Bit different than Ida who already had the maturity to suspect men, fend off their disrespect much of her career, and truly dread that treatment when she was downed even before it happened to her. And then her assault was about as brutal and long and intentional as it gets. She was lucky to be alive at the end of it. And truly not that sorry when she thought she was going to be shot after.

But Smith? It’s as confusing as it is horrifying and the mind doesn’t need to know all the dynamics and reasonings for the mind to be very aware of how intentionally cruel something is. But as some of us have been discussing, the fact it’s almost more of a tactic than a “crime of passion” out of anger, etc, there’s an extra layer of fucking with her mind.

But I think it also saves some of the act for her later on.

Like you’re saying, I think she might be able to enjoy it. Becasue sex romantically is so very different than anything she’s known before at all. I mentioned last night I do wonder if she’s even been kissed?! So kisses alone are startlingly lovely and when he moves to her neck and down to her breasts- she never expected the warm feeling of want she is filled with. The longing for closeness is a familiar one, one she’s shared with so many men and women who were her friends in the stalag. Heck, even with Benny before this, it’s immensely comforting to her even after her assault. She doesn’t associate closeness with danger. And that’s sweet. And helpful. Sex happens to be as close as to humans bodies can get, and put that way, passionately and warmly and safely, she craves it.

But the concept of later on, knowing more, processing better -maybe she even has daughters by then? And she really knows now just how intentional the evil against her was. And yeah, maybe she has a period of that being very very low.

[robcosposts]

Please re-blog this post and say what you want in season two of the fallout show

I already made a list, but I’m going to add a few more



I want Victor to make a cameo

I’m pretty sure last time I mentioned enclave but I would actually like more brotherhood of steel as well. More specifically seen some ideal logical conflict between different members of it we kind of got glimpse of that at the end of season one.

 Well I think this is 100% going to happen. I still have to put it on the list. I would love to see all three main characters traveling together.

I would also like to see the ghoulS character arc go further as in I would like to see him become more and more like his pre-war self

I would love the ghoul to confront his wife

I would like to see more raider groups because there was only really the one

And I would like more NCR I think I already said this one, but I really want more NCR because I don’t think NCR has fallen. I think it’s simply on the decline further.

And finally, I know I I already mentioned the brotherhood, but I really want a reference to fallout tactics brotherhood I want a reference to Midwestern brotherhood I think it would fit really well if it was opposed to the brotherhood of steel in the show. Well just look up what the fuck happens in the Midwest brotherhood and then see what the TV show brotherhood thinks of ghouls

[calder]

The following is based on Project V13 promotional material and is not canon.

In some situations, the term also specifically refers to those mutants who are uniquely compatible with plant life, such as Harold with Bob.[3]

// Background: Defcon is the second son of T-Minus. He is the spiritual leader // of the ghouls of Gravestone. He is a particularly leathery ghoul, and like // Harold, grows a little bonsai out the back of his head

On the sixtieth day of vomiting, St. Harold commanded that those followers closest to Plutonius shall not engage the heathens of the land. For those so close to achieving an understanding of the fire "One Cannot See" must remain pure of energy absorbing poisons.

DEFCON:  "(Shouting with religious fervor) And Plutonius said to Atom, "He who collides with another particle will, in turn, split the air asunder with shimmering power until his enemies are vanquished!!!"

v-13

[falloutconfessions]

“I kind of hope that we get an official fallout game set in the Midwest someday. I know we have Fallout Tactics, but that was declared non-canon except for pivotal important events since it kind of contradicts with some details in the games released before and after it. I just want a little love for my old neck of the woods, especially when it has its own interesting places and ways it could be used in the Fallout Universe, you know? 

Just... gimme some more lore about how the midwest faired after the Great War, goddamn it!”

Fallout Confessions

[orcusnoir]

More headcanons, this time video games

Note that isn't ALL the games they would play, but the ones they like the MOST. Or resonate with the most. Percy: Starting with the easiest, or rather second easiest. But Percy, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is a Metal Gear Solid stan. If there's ANY story out there that he would relate to more. It's Solid Snake's story, especially the whole "I just want to rest and be left alone but people keep dragging me back to fight battles."

TELL ME THAT DOESN'T FIT PERCY. HE JUST WANTS TO RELAX WITH ANNABETH BUT NOOO Outside of Metal Gear Solid, he's def a fan of Elder Scrolls (and LotR duh). "But Orcus" I hear you say "Percy said he doesn't like fantasy" and you would be correct. However, I raise you this. He doesn't like Urban Fantasy specifically. The whole "there's a secret magical world where we have to hide it from the Mort-er I mean Humans" trope is so stale to Percy that whenever he sees it the thought of flooding a publishing house briefly flickers through his mind. It's literally how he lives his life, so he hates urban fantasy. Though he would fucking LOVE Shadowrun, because while it is Urban Fantasy. It's not in the genre of 99.9% of urban fantasy, and it's different enough to his actual outside life that he can immerse himself in it. ______________________________________________________________ Annabeth: Okay, now for the easiest. In fact the reasons why she likes these games are so obvious that I don't feel like I need to explain myself. So let's just go on. SimCity, obviously, City Skylines, and...

Minecraft. "But, doesn't Minecraft have spiders?" Yes. That's why she uses creative mode. I don't think she'd be all in on survival, but creative? That's where she's designing some of her architectural projects in, she's got a LOT of building block and furniture mods I just know it. Honestly, now that I think of it, Annabeth would enjoy Rimworld.

______________________________________________________________ Frank: Civ. Frank plays Civilization and will lose DAYS of his life micro managing his cities. He has that same overly tactical mind, like Annabeth. However that's where they differ. Annabeth doesn't want to think about fighting when she relaxes, so while Civ would be up her ally, she wouldn't enjoy it all the time. As for Frank? Civ relaxes him. Even when the AI is doing some FUCKING BULLSHIT MOVES. Stellaris? Yep. Hearts of Iron? Crusader Kings? Yes. Victoria? Again, a yep. Any strategy game and Frank is ALL in on it. ______________________________________________________________ Hazel: Honestly, she's the difficult one. Same with Nico, but I feel like Diablo would be a natural fit. It's not too hard to pick up and learn, but it's got enough to learn to keep her interested. Same with Path of Exile. Hazel also shares a game with Nico, but I'll explain when I get to him. Also she totally plays Animal Crossing with Frank.

______________________________________________________________ Nico: Again, another tough one, or so I thought. Behold. FALLOUT. No seriously. Fallout would be PERFECT for Nico. He's literally from the time period, or close enough that he's almost certainly heard a fair number of the radio tracks featured in game. Fallout 3 would be a literal head trip for him, and the satirical nature of the games, the "I don't know what the fuck is going on, and what the fuck happened?" feeling that ALL of the protagonists have makes Nico (and Hazel) feel right at home. If anyone can relate to that, it's them. He totally plays Quake and DOOM though. ______________________________________________________________ Will: Will's the one that plays Animal Crossing. Well, not just Animal Crossing. Terraria? Stardew Valley? Also a yes. Will has a stressful job, so he's not interested in playing anything that's gonna stress him out. He def has a Minecraft world with Nico. While Will builds in more "modern" and bright color pallet. Nico is over there building elaborate gothic castles like it's nothing. Oh and LEGO Star Wars, but that's a given. And Battlefront 2. If it's Star Wars he's playing it. ______________________________________________________________ Alex: Alex and Magnus strike me as anarchists. Maybe illegalists, but def anarchists. However for Alex, I think she would actually enjoy Deus Ex. The original. Like, the whole "fuck Capitalism" theme of the game just gets Alex all giddy in a "how the fuck did they get away with this?" way. (Like the first "bad guy" you meet starts ranting off about corporate consolidation and tax rates. I'M NOT JOKING.) Same reason why she would enjoy watching Andor. It's got the theming, but it's not done in a way like you're reading political theory. It's just passive fun, and a good story. So on that note. Def Deus Ex. Metal Gear? Yeah, that too. Mass Effect? Sure, it has gay people in it, and for the time that was huge. (Y'all might not remember the absolute shit show that ME1 got into back in the day) Both her and Magnus play Assassin's Creed together. I just know. And TESIII: Morrowind. Trust me on this. ______________________________________________________________ Magnus: Magnus doesn't like violence. So he and Will share a lot of the same games actually. The guy sees more violence and bloodshed on a daily basis than any one person could comprehend. So games without a lot of that? He's all in for trying. So he def likes mostly Nintendo titles, maybe not Mario, but Zelda is a huge favorite. LEGO games are another solid choice, and I think he would be quite fond of Guilty Gear. ______________________________________________________________ Leo: Leo likes to build and to tinker with things. So he's messing around with Minecraft Redstone, or creating some awkward machine in Besiege (remember when that was all the rage?). But Leo's absolute favorite (was a dead and relatively unknown mecha title until this month) is Armored Core. Armored Core is the perfect game for someone like Leo, spend hours and I mean hours, I'm not making that up, tinkering and tuning each and every fucking part of your mech...only to die, and having to do it all over again. And he loves every. fucking. second. of it.